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Free-living songbirds show increased stress hormone levels when nesting under white street lights. But different light spectra may have different physiological effects as this study finds, suggesting that using street lights with specific colour spectra may mitigate effects of light pollution on wildlife

Remember winter, when everything was cold and grey? Right now, when all around is lush and green, the contrast couldn’t be greater. But is everything really as it seems? New research shows that we see things differently in winter compared with summer.

Last night, I retweeted Genomic Repairman’s request for the twitterverse to sign up for an account at LabSpaces. He wanted users to join in on the discussions he was having in the group he created. We were greeted moments later by a tweet from DrugMonkey saying that THE Facebook for science is dead. Considering I just wrote a blog post on that exact topic, I found his tweet Ironic. The emphasis in that previous post being that there probably will never be ONE single social hub for scientists, but that doesn’t preclude the formation of multiple niche venues. Please excuse me while I get this out of my system:

(rant)What exactly is a FaceBook for science anyway? Is any site with a science spin, groups, a forum, and/or user profiles a “FaceBook.” If that’s the case, then there are hundreds of FaceBooks for science out there. I’d argue that the term is deprecated. Many sites employ social tool . . . More

If you’re not familiar with the term, here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

“Internet neutrality is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates NO restrictions by Internet Service Providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and no restrictions on the modes of communication allowed.

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.”

Net Neutrality is all about safeguarding your freedom to choose what sites you visit, without being restricted or hindered. You should have the ability to check out both CNN and MSN, you should be able to watch videos on YouTube, and Vimeo. That sounds fair.

But what if for instance, and this is JUST an example, CNN were to strike a deal with an internet service provider and say hey, if we pay you some extra money, would you provide higher bandwidth to CNN sites and lower bandwidth to our competitors . . . More

NOTE: To avoid TL;DR responses, I'm going to break this story into two parts.

I think the experience I am about to relate is far enough passed that I can speak with a little more objectivity than I could have even a couple of weeks ago. I should note that, in the end, things did work out for the better ... for the most part.

The story starts about a year ago when a manuscript of mine was accepted for publication. It appears that the reviewers recommended the manuscript for "Featured Paper of the Issue" which meant that in addition to getting the manuscript published (the major goal), I'd get some press out of it as well. Totally win-win!

I was told that as the article approached the publication date I would be contacted by a member of the journal staff about what I would need to do in regards to the press release. I figured that eventually I would receive a call from a staff science writer who, having read the paper, would ask me some questions to flesh out the final details and proof what they had written.

So I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Ten days before the issue was to be released I was sent an email that contained a long list of items to consider for writing a press release. I was asked to get back to the . . . More

I recently got an e-mail from David Bradley asking my opinion of Web 2.0 as it relates to science, where it’s heading, and how we can get scientists more involved in web 2.0 / data sharing / and the semantic web. I thought this would be a great topic for me to write a real post on since I’ve been involved in this field and trying to promote the ideas of web 2.0 in the sciences for the last 5 years.

For starters, I really have no idea what it will take to get scientists to be fully engaged with the on-line world. It's hard enough to get them engaged in the real world (I wish that was a joke…). I think for most scientists to get involved with a network, we're going to have to develop something that significantly increases scientific productivity, and I'm not talking just a free reference management site or being able to post lab retreat pictures to a profile. The last 4-5 years have showed us that scientists really are not interested in FaceBooks for science. The marginal success of ResearchGate, NatureNetwork, and LabSpaces can't be cited as triumphs because very little of wh . . . More

With the completion of the September contest, I would like to up the ante a bit. Over the last few weeks I've been talking with the bloggers about ways we can increase readership and inspire greater interaction on the blog posts. We decided that it might be fun to try a high stakes contest. This month's contest will be for a basic Apple iPad! The bloggers have very generously donated over $300 to fund this contest and BioData the creators of BioKM are sponsoring us for the rest!. This is also my birthday month, so I thought it might be nice to do something extra special!

This contest will work similarly to the last one in which the user with the most points at the end of the month will win the grand prize. The two runners up will get the standard novelty junk package! So it's a win-win for everyone.

How Do I Earn Points

Earning points on the site is easy. First of all, you must be a . . . More

This is not about Steve Jobs, although I do find a certain irony in the prolific repetition of so many of his quotes about free thinking, creativity and not living someone else’s life. But it’s not a new irony. We see it all the time. Another oft-requoted personality that comes to mind in recent years is Seth Godin; but there’s no shortage of people whose quotes today would have graced the actual hardcopy framed motivatonal posters of twenty years ago. Facebook and Twitter make that obvious. Sometimes painfully so…it’s flabbergasting how mindlessly some of this stuff can spread. There’s a Jobs quote about the value of individuals vs. the value of groups….but I bet you’ve read it three or four times today already, so I won’t bother. ;)

It isn’t that some of these people don’t have something valuable to say. The problem is that we get so caught up in the cleverness of the revelation that we don’t bother to pause long enough to internalize it. It’s so much easier to appreciate the execution than it is the actual thought behind it. It’s the ‘package vs. content’ problem all over again.

There is a deeper problem, of course, one that no one wants to consciously face: true wisdom doesn’t come in neat, 140 character packages. It comes w . . . More